Reading to Distraction
Red, White & Royal Blue + Low + Children of Virtue and Vengeance + Amazons
Dear Reader,
April, TS Eliot famously informed us, is the cruellest month. The data models for the spread of Covid-19 suggest he may have been onto something. If the projections are accurate, April is going to ravage the 205 countries impacted by Covid-19. So far, India has reported 38 deaths and the city I live in — Mumbai — is a ‘hotspot’ for the virus. Yesterday, 82 new cases were reported in Maharashtra and 59 of these were in Mumbai. The numbers are low. Unfortunately, this is not reassuring because all experts agree that the low rate of testing means we really don’t know the exact extent to which it’s spread. We’re just desperately hoping it hasn’t reached the rural hinterland and can be contained in urban areas.
The nationwide lockdown that is currently in place ends is scheduled to end on April 14 (which is a terrifying thought considering the spike in cases despite the current restrictions on movement) and the Supreme Court has directed the media to “refer to and publish the official version about the developments” regarding Covid-19. Warms the cockles of my heart. That’s just the sort of directive we need in this medical emergency; especially since government briefings have included instances of watching Health Ministry official Lav Agarwal tell a scientist from the Indian Council of Medical Research to re-record his statement so that it doesn’t cause “panic”. (The ICMR guy had said that if we want to contain the spread of Covid-19, India needs to exercise caution and limit movement for the next few months.)
(Photograph by Arun Sankar of AFP.)
In the newest edition of the New Yorker magazine, Jill Lepore has written about loneliness — not solitude — across the ages. (Lepore also wrote a wonderful essay on “contagion fables” in the last issue. She explored how this genre of literature is plagued less by death and more by the fear of losing what makes us human.) Lepore makes the distinction between solitude (calming and restorative) and loneliness (“a state of profound distress”). There is a theory that posits that our minds are wired to process being alone as a state of emergency because we’re descended from primates who are all about social units. “In the age of quarantine, does one disease produce another?” Lepore asks.
There’s no consensus on whether social media and the internet intensify a sense of loneliness or make users feel connected, but in some ways, messaging apps and social media are being used to create a tribal network. They do inspire deep loyalty — after all, many believe news circulated on WhatsApp to the exclusion of other sources (like mainstream media, family etc). How these ties respond to our anxious, apocalyptic times, we’ll find out. I suppose it all depends on how you use these media. If you’re using the internet to stay in touch with people you care about and to keep yourself reliably informed, it’s all good. On the other hand, if all you’re doing online is performing, social media is likely to leave you feeling more isolated than ever.
Social distancing has meant an explosion of performances, particularly using video on platforms like Instagram and Tiktok. From cellist Yo Yo Ma’s snippety concerts to the couple who arranged themselves to look like a cowboy on a horse (her magnificent blond hair was the horse’s tail); Italian politicians yelling at others to observe quarantine; and the Cuomo brothers bickering on CNN, it’s been a feast of entertainment. Most of these videos are trying to establish an illusion of normalcy and optimism. Sure Covid-19 is nightmarishly contagious and has a high death rate, but look! Brothers are still ribbing each other. Couples are still doing cooky things. Italians are still gesticulating madly and praise the heavens, we still have music. All is not lost. Right? Right?
With pretty much every photograph and video we upload, and every update that we post, we’re piecing together a new ideal of what we’d like normal to be. The world we want to live in seems to be one with blue skies and spring blossoms, where people are profusely creative and good-humoured. A world full of harmony and laughter and kindness, unblemished by the cruelty, desperation and inequality that this pandemic is actually revealing in our societies. Along with the illusions we’d like to encourage, some of our performances also reveal our ignorance and our ugly vanities.
There is a terrifying and fascinating archive we’re creating with every passing moment that we spend online and over the past couple of weeks, I’ve found myself wondering whether seeing this archive later will push future generations to redefine what “humane” means. Perhaps it will come to mean callous discrimination, like the sort being practiced by those who accuse people from the North-East of bringing the deadly virus to India (actually, from what we can tell, Indian tourists to Italy probably brought Covid-19 to India. So far, all those tourists are mainlanders, mostly from north and west India. Just FYI). Or the landlords who are turfing out medical staff working at isolation wards and the privileged who are actively working to shut out the homeless.
But enough pontification. On to the books, which are allegedly the point of this newsletter.
It’s been a mixed bag of reading in March, which is particularly growl-inducing because in these wretched times, a good book is a great comfort. Still, one new title that did offer a lovely little escape was Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston. McQuiston’s is a romance between two men, so if you’re a homophobe, this one is not for you.
I thoroughly enjoyed this love story about a gay prince of England who, for all his imperious poshness, likes being (lightly) dominated by who else, but an all-American hero, who just happens to be the half-Latinx son of POTUS. Oh, and the President is a once-divorced woman with a supportive second husband and a mostly-female staff. My feminist pulse points are a-flutter just typing those words.
The American president’s son Alex Claremont-Diaz is a bit of a heartthrob and he milks his twinkle-eyed charm for all its worth. The only thorn in his side is Prince Henry of the United Kingdom, whose unflappable primness sets Alex’s teeth on edge. After the two of them unwittingly end up causing a mini international incident — involving, of all things, cake — Alex is sternly instructed to play nice with Henry.
Alex finds himself warming to the insomniac prince and the two become friends, and nothing seems particularly out of order until one evening, a drunk Henry grabs hold of Alex and plonks a thoroughly improper kiss on Alex’s lips. It turns out that Prince Henry is very, very gay (so much so that he carries a “travel-size” bottle of lube in his toiletry kit).
Did I mention Alex thinks he’s straight?
(Obviously, he isn’t really.)
Red, White & Royal Blue has been on multiple bestseller lists in America and was Goodreads’ best romance of 2019. That it’s a gay romance, featuring a hero who is bisexual and not white, and a president who is pretty much the polar opposite of Donald Trump, is enormously heartwarming. Maybe there’s hope for us yet.
For those with tender sensibilities, there is a fair amount of carnal groping, but McQuiston steers clear of graphic descriptions.
On to a very different love story.
Low by Jeet Thayil is the story of a man grieving for his wife, who committed suicide. With his wife’s ashes in a little box, a middle-aged Dom Ullis leaves Delhi, where he and his wife had lived, and comes to Mumbai, where Dom had lived as a young man. Since this is a novel by Thayil, no doubt you have guessed that Dom, who is a writer, goes on to find drugs and alcohol in copious quantities. Some of us know Mumbai as a city of midnight walks that allow you to stumble upon a special chai or kebab guy. Thayil’s Mumbai, on the other hand, is one in which you meet a kindly drug dealer for breakfast; walk into a bacchanalia at noon; catch up with a wealthy and alcoholic socialite for lunch; wander over to Alibagh for a party in the evening; and hang out with cocaine-sniffing power brokers post-dinner.
Dom spends much of Low trying to avoid acknowledging and processing the fact of his wife’s passing. When that becomes impossible to do, she appears as a phantasm — an apparition he can only see under the influence of heroin (don’t miss the grim heroin/ heroine pun there). There’s a flamboyant, intoxicating excess to Low that is all about Dom’s desperate desire to understand why his wife Aki left him, and how he can avoid both the loneliness and his memories. Every now and then, Low is viciously, morbidly funny, like when someone mistakes Aki’s ashes for cocaine and effectively snorts her. It’s a good high, we’re told. Most of the time, the novel meanders, desperately sad and seemingly aimless. Thayil’s language is, as always, beautiful, whether in throwaway lines (“There was nothing minor about the heart and its problems.”) or entire passages, like the one in which Dom remembers “the vast spiritual archipelago” of “low” that the depressed Aki had inhabited when she was alive.
It’s impossible to read this book without thinking of the real-life parallels. Like Dom, Thayil is also a writer with roots in Mumbai; he was living in New York when he was diagnosed with hepatitis C; poet Shakti Bhatt, his wife, died suddenly in 2007. I imagine reading Low is a very different experience if you knew Bhatt or were there to witness what happened after her passing.
Without those connections, Dom’s wanderings in the Hades, sorry Mumbai, don’t make for compelling reading. Everything other than his grief feels strangely artificial, which may have been exactly what Thayil was going for because the intensity of grief does make the real, living world feel ephemeral and insubstantial. Unfortunately, neither Dom nor Aki come together as identifiable people, so as a reader, it’s frustrating to not be able to get a sense of what is happening behind the façade of intoxication and sadness. There are flashes when Dom lets you glimpse his misery and the guilt that he is grappling with, but they’re overwhelmed by his many avoidance tactics. Low, for all its electric gloom and flashes of poetry, is a novel that’s easy to put down and abandon. That said, if you stay with it, there are fragments of it that will stay with you.
“He remembered the multitudes of meaning the word low held for Aki. If he asked what she’d been doing all day she would say, ‘I was low’. As if it were a full-time job. If he asked where she’d been, she’d say, ‘I’ve been low’. As if it were a republic to which she had a multiple-entry twenty-year visa. Or she would say, ‘Listen, sunshine, I better warn you, the low is coming. I can feel it.’ Once he had suggested they take a weekend trip out of Delhi and she’d said. ‘I can’t do it tomorrow, I’m going to the low.’ As if her low country lay everywhere like a vast spiritual archipelago.”
(I don’t know why, but I imagine the landscape of Aki’s Low to resemble the forest of crystal trees from Annihilation.)
Despite having the memory of a doorknob, I have no trouble remembering how everything inside me was humming with excitement and anticipation when I reached the last page of Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone. The first book in the Legacy of Orisha series was super fun and I couldn’t wait to see what was going to happen in this imaginary land where magic had returned with a vengeance after a lifetime of the magical being oppressed.
In fact, I was so desperate to get my paws on Children of Virtue and Vengeance that I actually wrote to Pan Macmillan, who are distributing the book in India, asking for an advance copy. At the time that I’d written to them, they hadn’t even got the press release for the book ready. So that should give you some indication of my enthusiasm.
Understand, then, how it feels for me to tell you that my one-word reaction to Children of Virtue and Vengeance is: meh.
At the end of 404 pages, I’m still not sure why the return of magic hasn’t healed the rift in Orisha, where the main hierarchy was between the non-magical who dominated the maji, who belonged to magical clans.Many of the non-magical gained magical powers at the end of the first book. You’d think this would lead to new alliances and social change. But no, the bad guys are still the royal family and its court in book two. Only now, in the absence of King Saran, there’s a new force of evil in his wife, Queen Nehanda, who is among those to have discovered magical powers. Very little of Children of Virtue and Vengeance added up for me and the whole time, I felt like I was reading a book that is basically throwing diversions and fillers at readers, while Adeyemi finishes the last book in the trilogy which will have the climactic battle between the maji and King Saran (yup, of course the Big Daddy of Bad Guys from the first book is still alive. Oh wait. That’s a spoiler. Oops).
Look, Adeyemi is a gifted storyteller, so it’s not like this book is unreadable. There’s a lot of action and some intriguing bits of magic. I’d have liked to know more about the maji sanctuary that Zelie and gang find themselves in, but Adeyemi was just obsessed with violence and battle scenes, which bored me because they were mostly predictable in terms of their outcomes. Children of Virtue and Vengeance has all the problems of a second book in a trilogy, beginning with the arrogance of a writer who assumes their reader will remember the first part and doesn’t work at ensuring the sequel works as a standalone. Good examples of writers who don’t make these mistakes are Margaret Atwood (who helpfully provided recaps at the start of the sequels to Oryx and Crake, the first book in the brilliant Madaddam trilogy) and Hilary Mantel (the books in the Wolf Hall series work both as standalone as well as part of a trilogy). In addition to this, the story in Children of Virtue and Vengeance stagnates and the characters see awkward shifts in their personality (possibly to justify what they will do in the final part). So yeah. Meh.
And finally, the lowest point of my March reading was Amazons by John Man. For the first 100 pages, Amazons is excellent as Man tells you about the historical warrior women of Central Asia who inspired the legend of Amazons. He takes you to archaeological digs, explores the connections between history and myths, and looks at what about these women warriors fascinated male authors and historians of the classical world. Man writes with wit and fluency, which makes Amazons not just easy to read, but also entertaining.
One of my favourite parts of the book is when Man introduces "paleopathologist" Eileen Murphy, who has studied the bones found in Scythian tombs in Central Asia. It turns out that you can really tell a lot about a society from the bones of the dead. For instance, from the many malformations that were found in the bones and the approximate ages of death, Murphy suggests the Scythians didn’t just tolerate those with deformities, but also took care of them. Scythian women’s bones show the kind of hairline fractures in the lower back area that many modern athletes have. Traces of the injuries sustained suggest “weapon trauma” and that the women also had hand-to-hand combat with their enemies.
Another great bit in Amazons is the case of the Ice Maiden, whose mummified, tattooed body emerged out of permafrost some 2,000 years after her death. Very little is known for sure about this woman beyond the fact that she was 25 when she died, had gorgeous tattoos and wore an elaborate wig. Rather than a warrior, it seems she was a priestess/ shaman of some sort and in the 2000s, she became an icon for the region in Altai where she’d been buried. Altai is a Russian republic in southern Siberia and when there were a series of earthquakes in the region in 2003, Altaians concluded it was because their Ice Maiden had been taken out of the homeland (the Ice Maiden was being studied by a research team in Siberia). Even though genetically there’s no connection between the Ice Maiden and modern-day Altaians, she’s become a symbol of Altaian identity.
Unfortunately, after the first few excellent chapters on the idea of the Amazonian warrior, Man’s book is a series of digressions which have only the most tangential connection to Amazons and their myth. For instance, I rolled my eyes so much while reading the chapter on mounted archery and its modern-day high priest Lajos Kassai, it’s a wonder my eyeballs didn’t pop out of their sockets. In case you were wondering, Man devoted a chapter to Kassai and mounted archery because the Amazons were remembered as horse-riding warriors, famed for their archery. And yes, there is a chapter on Wonder Woman too, but really, if you’re interested in the origins of that comic book character, you’re better off reading The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Lepore.
How did this newsletter become a Lepore love fest?
Anyway, that’s all I have for you at the moment. Before I go, a quick reminder that the books podcast I’ve done with Supriya Nair, The Lit Pickers, is here and possibly on your preferred podcast platform. My love for podcasts has soared during these weeks of social isolation since I play them while doing the housework. In case you were wondering, no I don’t listen The Lit Pickers, but that’s because I find it extremely hard to listen to me talking without wanting to throttle myself, and this is really not a good time to saddle my apartment with the hassle of disposing my body. That said, others who are listening to us seem to be enjoying the series. Our last episode will be out soon and we recorded it in isolation, talking into our phones while doing our best to not talk over one another and viscerally missing the physical cues that we get from one another when we’re sitting face to face.
I want to leave you with a quote from Adrienne Rich, whose Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations I’ve been re-reading:
“The sleepwalkers are coming awake, and for the first time this awakening has a collective reality; it is no longer such a lonely thing to open one’s eyes.”
Open your eyes, wash your hands, stay well and remember, you’re not alone.
(By the way, if you find yourself not able to concentrate on full-length books and short stories, volumes of essays might be what you need right now. I’d recommend writers like bell hooks, John Berger, Susan Sontag, Audre Lorde and of course, Rich, because their writing manages to balance critique and insight with optimism and an appreciation of beauty.)
Thank you for reading. Dear Reader will be back soon.